Designing for the ideal balance between cost and comfort

FINDING THE BALANCE

As architect, your design influences the thermal performance of a home, which affects your client’s upfront and ongoing costs for their hydronic central heating system. The less heat a home loses, the more flexible we can be with the central heating design, ensuring that your client will get better value for money.

At KE KELIT, we specialise in Hydronic Central heating. We find the ideal balance between capital cost and life cycle cost, without compromising on comfort.

Capital Cost. The goal is to minimise this but in a sensible way - because lowering capital cost too far will only increase the ongoing cost and decrease comfort levels.

Ongoing cost. Keeping the cost of running and maintaining your system as low as possible without requiring a significant capital cost or impacting on comfort

With KE KELIT you access a full in-house team of engineers who really are passionate about central heating. They are experts in thermal simulation software, trained in Europe and skilled in creating both accurate calculations and designs for robust central heating systems.

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We'd love to talk to you

YOUR INFLUENCE ON THERMAL PERFORMANCE

The amount of heat loss that your project will experience (through your design + materials) directly determines the amount of materials to heat it. It’s not rocket science: limiting your project’s heat loss as much as possible enables more flexibility for designing your client’s central heating system. Which means they’ll have to spend less - both upfront and ongoing. Which all adds up to a happy client.

DRIVERS OF THERMAL EFFICIENCY

INSULATION

GLAZING AND THERMAL BREAKS

INSULATION AND THERMAL BREAKS

REDUCE YOUR CLIENT’S OPERATING COSTS BY 10%

Example bedroom - before thermal improvements:

Let’s say that the thermal calculations have determined that a bedroom will need 700 watts to maintain the desired temperature. This pretend room has available space for a radiator measuring 600mm high and 1,000mm wide. To get 700 watts of heat output from a radiator in that space, the heated water will need to be 75°C.

Example bedroom - after thermal improvements:

If we use R 2.0 insulation in the walls (instead of R 1.9), R 3.3 ceiling insulation (instead of R 2.9) and upgrade the windows slightly (to include thermal breaks in the aluminium frames), we can reduce the bedroom’s heat loss by 15%.

The same sized radiator now only needs to produce 600 watts of heat, which means the heated water temperature can be reduced to 70°C. Every degree in heated water temperature adds 2% to the ongoing running costs, so you’ve just saved your clients 10% per month. It’s worth focusing on thermal performance and heat loss of your project at the very start.